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Before the Annual Convention of the Psi Upsilon Societies of the various 
Colleges in the United States, held at Syracuse, May 10th, 18S2. 

By CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 



BY 'IkaNSFER 



3 1910 



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Before the Annual Convention of the Psi Upsilon Societies of the various 
Colleges in the United States, held at Syracuse, May 10th, 1882. 

By CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 



Gentlemen : 

It is a pleasure and privilege to meet 
with you here to day. I come not as a teacher, 
but as an elder brother to greet the active workers in 
Psi Upsilon. I leave for the "moment the cares of an 
arduous profession, the duties of an active business, the 
engrossing demands of an all surrounding materialism 
to renew these associations of early manhood. A life 
has little in it worth living, which cannot frequently 
return to the memories, the aspirations, the hopes of its 
beginning. By occasional draughts from these fountains 
daily duties cease to be the routine of the treadmill, 
work becomes a recreation, the hardening processes 
produced by contact and contest with selfishness and 
viciousness are arrested, and our confidence in human 
nature, its purity, its development, its possibilities is 
sustained and enlarged. It is proper that you upon the 
threshold and I in mid career should reason away our 
hour for discussion in reviewing the necessity, the uses 
and the duties of a liberal education. 

The Guild of higher education is the most liberal 
of all orders. Unlike other Unions, there is no limit to 



its membership or restriction upon the number of those 
who shall be trained for admission. 

It is a pure Democracy, where honors are only 
worn by those who win them, and cannot be transmit- 
ted or inherited. It has no secrets, but while it explores 
the whole field of knowledge, its discoveries are for the 
benefit of all mankind. Its object is to lay broad and 
deep the foundations, by such mastery of language, 
science and literature as best prepares the way for the 
professions, the arts, the humanities and the liberal per- 
suits of life, trains and develops the intellect, and adds 
to the strength and manliness of character. It is the 
duty and destiny of the human race to improve its con- 
dition. Through all the trials and tribulations of the 
ages, it has been true to this destiny. Its history is one 
of progress and development. For centuries, however, 
its story is the biography of isolated and eminent individ- 
uals. Conquerors and philosophers stand out in startling 
prominence from the groveling and ignorant masses 
about them. There was for long periods, no healthy or 
permanent growth ; only as education has been free 
alike to all has society as a whole improved. Students 
echo the statement that there is nothing new under 
the Sun, but all the arts we have were once known and 
then lost. That is because the secret of them was con- 
fined to the few and kept from the masses. Education 
has been the great leveller and. elevator. The mighty 
revolutions produced by the invention of gunpowder, 
printing, steam and electrical appliances, the enlarge- 
ment of liberty and law, the triumphs and beneficent 



results of science and mechanism have followed and ac- 
celerated the diffusion of liberal culture. 

We live in a time when the average intelligence is 
higher, the purity and perfection of Society greater, 
and the essential liberties larger than ever before. As 
the demand for trained workers, and the necessity for 
thorough preparation increase, so do the difficulties in 
the way of solid learning. Speed is the virtue and vice 
of our generation. We demand that morning glories and 
century plants shall submit to the same conditions and 
ilower with equal frequency. The inventive genius of 
mankind has provided labor saving machines for every 
necessity and luxury. By it industries have been stim- 
ulated, and the results of labor reduplicated beyond 
the power of language to state. One man takes the 
place of a hundred workers, the labor which formerly 
required a year, is now performed in a day, and time 
and space are annihilated. State building in earlier 
times was the process of centuries, now it is the easy 
outgrowth of a decade. The iron rail is laid through the 
wilderness, and the next summer the industrious immi- 
grant gathers the harvest, which feeds the World. This 
vast and incalculable multiplication of power, this grasp 
and utilization of all the forces of nature, projects and 
and successfully executes enterprises, whose magnitude 
surpasses the dreams of the Arabian Romancer. The 
Orient has listlessly listened for ages to the story teller's 
tales of the wonders worked, by mighty Genii, and 
the Fairy phantasies created by Shakespeare, have been 
the delight of the world, but they are both surpassed by 



4 

the daily common places of our time. Individuals 
accumulate fortunes whose income exceeds the revenue 
of Kingdoms, and every State in the Union can boast of 
a millionaire whose wealth reduces to comparative 
poverty the traditional treasures of Croesus and 
Crassus. There is fever in the blood and fire in the 
brain. The people are possessed with this fierce energy 
of industrial and material progress. Cortez, Pizarro and 
De Soto sought not more recklessly El Dorado, and the 
Fountain of Youth, than does our population, the sud- 
den accumulation of riches. To the luxuries which 
wealth could always command, are now added, the con- 
trol of great enterprises, the concentration of power, the 
social distinction and adulation, which formerly be- 
longed to lofty lineage, or great achievements in arms, 
the arts or literature. The contagion of the conflict, the 
fruits of its victories, affect almost alike the ignoble, the 
ingenuous, and the ambitious, and the few for its posses- 
sion, the many for its uses and opportunities, plunge 
with absorbing anxiety into this struggle for money. 
The Church, the College, the Forum, the Senate, all feel 
the pressure and the effects of this consuming passion. 

Hence the danger and difficulties which now threat- 
en liberal culture. Amid the din and clash, the rush 
and roar of industrial activities and speculative excite- 
ments, the young man finds it very hard to secure the 
time, repose, and encouragement necessary to lay that 
firm and solid foundation, without which a liberal edu- 
cation, and broad and healthful development of the 
intellectual faculties are alike impossible. Ko greed is 



D 



so unsatisfactory, no economy so wasteful, as that which 
begrudges or saves the years, necessary for thorough 
preparation. It is mainly from the ranks of the common 
people, that the army of liberal education is recruited. 
From farm and workshop come the men who will dare 
and suffer in the service of learning, their goal is knowl- 
edge, their destiny to wield its power. The successful and 
opulent desire that their sons shall become also opulent 
and successful at the earliest possible moment. Precept 
and example impel only to those studies which can easi- 
est be made practically available. They besiege the 
doors of the University, the Law School, the Medical 
College, clamoring for a short road to business. The 
Colleges recognize the demand and enlarging the bound- 
aries, and loosening the discipline of the curriculum, 
permit the substitution of elective studies to, those who 
have neither the ability or experience to elect, and grant 
diplomas for bread and butter equipments. Some not 
satisfied with this are rushed in a year through Business, 
or Commercial, or other Specialty Colleges, and boast 
that while their companions are digging amid the bones 
and dust of the buried past, they, having purchased a 
ready made suit of mental clothing, are achieving inde- 
pendence and fortune. Father and son anxious for 
immediate results, say these precious years when a prac- 
tice might be secured, or a business established, cannot 
be spared for dead languages, science, philosophy, and 
literature, which are not essential in the practical work 
of the professions, or merchandise, or manufactures. If 
they select engineering for their vocation, that school is 



6 

best which puts them soonest in the field. If they are 
inclined to literary pursuits, their ambition is not to 
produce works which will contribute to learning, adorn 
the library and win solid fame, but by popular and 
ephemeral processes to sell the millions of trash, and 
win the fortunes, which shall compensate for forgetful- 
ness and oblivion. If they aspire to the pulpit, they 
spurn the weary years and tireless labor, by which alone 
the sources of faith and truth are explored and mastered, 
and their studies are to so gild the Gospel and cultivate 
the social graces, as to secure the wealthiest church and 
largest salary. If law or medicine is to be their avoca- 
tion, they will learn only so much as will most speedily 
bring fees and retainers, and leave the battle for the 
right in society, and government, to reformers and poli- 
ticians, and the ministering to the poor and suffering, 
and the defence of the weak and the wronged to phil- 
anthropists and fools. This teaching and practice has 
filled the land with narrow minded, partly informed and 
bigoted specialists, useless to themselves or the world 
outside their avocation, and not great within it, and 
with shallow idiots, who fresh from the tailors' block 
and hair dressers' chair, gabble about art and beauty 
and aesthetics and " culchaw." 

But while Arkwright with his spinning Jenny en- 
abled one set of finders to do the work of thousands, 

O 7 

Fulton with his steamboat created modern commerce, 
Howe with his sewing machine indefinitely multiplied 
the results of labor, Whitney with his cotton gin revo- 
lutionized a continent and the Corliss Engine concen- 




trated a century in every cycle of the Sun, Znere is no 
royal road to learning ; application, work, continuity 
and enthusiasm are its conditions. It is true, the dead 
languages are not in daily use in the pulpit, the forum 
or business, that science, philosophy, history, belle lettres 
do not of themselves cure souls or patients, win causes or 
coin money. It is true that modern languages with their 
exhaustless stores of priceless learning claim equal 
regard and study. But those better and more safely 
navigate the stream who know it from source to delta, 
and whose vision is not bounded by the territory where 
they ply their trade. The languages not only give 
grace and accuracy to the expression of thoughts, open 
the treasure houses of knowledge, furnish the weapons 
to overcome error and prejudice, but through them 
Wilkinson wrote the lives of Pharoahs, who had been 
forgotten before history was born, and Layard, Eawlin- 
son and Rassam have dug from under the Tower of Babel 
and deciphered the library of Nebuchadnezzar, and by 
its testimony overthrown the speculations of infidelity, 
corroborated the Bible and buttressed the faith of Chris- 
tendom. Science has made plain the secrets of animate and 
inanimate nature, and philosophy has mapped the mind. 
Companionship and familiarity with the worthies, the 
thoughts, the achievements and the discoveries of other 
times so influence character, so enlarge the intellect, so 
increase the ability to grasp and sift and find the truth, 
that one so privileged is promoted in his vocation from 
a soldier to a Knight, his work is not labor, but love, 
and while he adorns and honors his specialty, his man- 



hood adds to the value and influence of his citizenship. 
We are the heirs of all the accumulations of the past, 
but we cannot prove our title and secure our inheritance 
by the decree of the Surrogate or the award of the 
Courts of Probate, it comes only through the honest 
acquisition of a liberal education. 

While such a man comes later to his life work, he 
makes Dot only a better preacher, lawyer, doctor, editor 
or man of affairs, but outside his profession he pos- 
sesses resources for pleasure to himself and influ- 
ence over others which add immeasurably to the 
enjoyment of living. 

Two races of men planted thousands of years ago, 
the germs of all the civilization and culture we possess, 
^^lie Egyptians and the Greeks. 

With the Egyptians learning was a mystery. It 
was subdivided into branches and these were the ex- 
clusive hereditary property of families. They shared 
neither with each other or the world, the things they 
knew. Only those initiated through mystic rites could 
enter the order, and they only to one degree. The re- 
sult was, that their art and learning were of the earth, 
earthy and have perished. Their Pyramids, Obelisks, 
Columns, Sphinxs, testify to the grandeur and material- 
ism of their culture, but of their sages, philosophers, 
poets, not even a name survives. 

The education of Greece, on the other hand, was 
free and open to all. Her schools and gymnasiums 
had doors on every side. All that she knew or discov- 
ered was the common property of tbe world. Emula- 



9 

tion stimulated enquiry, and freedom gave birth to 
genius. Phidias, and Praxiteles, Demosthenes, Socrates, 
Plato and Aristotle, Pericles and Leonidas are house- 
hold names to-day. They instruct in the studio, teach 
in the college, legislate in the senate and fight in the 
field. Her art, eloquence, philosophy, literature and 
patriotism have been the inspiration, admiration and 
despair of succeeding centuries. We have adopted this 
free system and upon its preservation, development and 
use, depend the growth of society and the prosperity of 
the nation. The people have built and endowed uni- 
versities and libraries. The generous benefactions to 
Harvard and Yale, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and the 
Vanderbilt, the Astor and Lenox libraries, with scores 
of kindred efforts, attest the value placed by those who 
have and those who have not enjoyed its benefits, upon 
a liberal education. As the encouragement of the State 
and the contributions of the liberal, have thus furnished 
us our opportunity, so do we owe in return, a larger 
recompense than our personal success. It is to be pub- 
lic spirited, generous in our efforts to aid our fellows in 
the never ending strife between truth and error, to do 
the best we can, whatever we undertake to do at all, 
and as preachers be more than doctrinaries, as teachers 
more than machines, as lawyers more than advocates, as 
editors more than partisans, illustrating anew each day 
that knowledge is power and American men of culture 
understand its proper use. Thus the men whom scholar- 
ship has blest, are true to the high duties of their order, 
and bless the state and mankind. Far be it from me to 



10 

disparage diligence in business, or discourage the accu- 
mulation of independence and fortune. That man would 
be untrue to his mission, his family and his happiness, 
who failed to do thoroughly his work, and prudently 
provide for those dependent upon him and for his own 
old age, but he can neither like a miser, hoard for his 
selfish gratification, the learning he has acquired or 
neglect the larger responsibilities imposed, in a free 
government, upon its educated men. 

The great motors of modern progress have come 
from the Universities They have not been accidents, 
but the developments of learning. They have been 
evolved from the patient processes of the schools and 
the wealth, comforts, luxuries of mankind are due to 
the teachings of the colleges. In the laboratory of the 
university of Glasgow, the application of steam to the 
arts and mechanics was discovered, by which the world 
has accomplished more in the last century than during 
the whole period since the birth of Christ. By thought- 
ful and intelligent experiments at Princeton, electricity 
was utilized and under man's control the lightning 
belts the Globe, furnishes an illuminating medium which 
rivals the Sun, and suggests the possibility of a new 
force moving the industries, incalculably accelerating 
productiveness and power. The study of astronomy 
and its revelations have created the science of naviga- 
tion and made upon the trackless ocean beaten high- 
ways for commerce. From science and mathematics 
have come the principles underlying and suggesting all 
the marvellous inventions which are the pride and glory 



11 

of our age. While by chemistry the elements have been 
wrung from Nature, to enable the physician to cure dis- 
eases, mitigate suffering and prolong the span of human 
life*. 

The Universities in all ages have been the nurseries 
and citadels of liberty. When Church and State con- 
spired together to crush the last vestiges of civil and 
religious freedom, when independence died upon the 
scaffold and the block, thought was incarcerated in dun- 
geons, and conscience was burned at the stake, and 
tortured on the rack, and Abelard brilliant and beauti- 
ful, groping in the dark for truth, fled to the wilderness, 
fifteen thousand students gathered about him, and for 
their own government organized a pure democracy. At 
Oxford, Paris, Berlin, Prague, wherever a University 
existed, there student Republics built upon Abelard's 
model, trained and graduated the Apostles of Liberty. 
It was the students who precipitated the revolution of 
1848, which altered the map and liberalized every 
government in Europe. With a million of soldiers and 
a million of policemen to uphold despotism, and sup- 
press liberty in Russia, the spirit of her colleges keeps 
the Czar a prisioner in his own palace. From their 
professors' chairs at Wurtemberg and Prague, Luther and 
Huss started the reformation, to which we chiefly owe our 
modern civilization. Knox went from the University 
at Aberdeen to thunder in the presence of Mary Queen 
of Scots, those terrible truths which made Scotland the 
home and centre of culture and religious enquiry, and 
that sweet and mighty Oxford professor John Wyckliffv j 



12 

in giving to the people the English Bible, started a 
movement which ended in the Declaration of our 
Independence, and the formation of the American 
Republic. 

The Knights of the order to which these men be- 
longed cannot be idle. The repose of learning is delight- 
ful, quiet companionship and enjoyment of favorite 
authors and the solitude of congenial study full of re- 
fined and quiet pleasure. But such is not their mission. 
Religious revulsions, social revolutions, popular elect- 
ions, the making of laws, the direction of those forces in 
free communities and States, which are constantly work- 
ing for good or evil, demand attention and direction. 
Man is ever struggling for real or imaginary emancipa- 
tion. His enemy exists or he creates it. It may be 
against genuine. injustice that he rebels, or ignorant and 
misled, against those conditions and restraints absolutely 
essential to safety and order. In his effort to throw off 
the tyranny of forms, he would uproot all faiths. In his 
protest against inequalities of fortune and position, he 
wages an indiscriminate warfare against capital, careless 
or forgetful of the fact that powerful combinations and 
vast resources are necessary in conducting the great 
enterprises which in our time develop national wealth 
and promote individual prosperity and happiness. 
Educated intelligence keeps radicalism within proper 
limits / and forces it to conserve the highest purposes, by 
harnessing it to the car of progress. The masses have 
been so educated and society as a whole so elevated, 
that the destinies of mankind can no longer be changed 



or controlled by Croniwells or Napoleons. . Atheism 
assails the Church, communism order, socialism society, 
financial heresies credit, State rights the Republic, and 
they can only be met and overcome by the resistless 
logic of superior knowledge. The Oneida community 
reforms, Mormonism topples towards its downfall. 
Greenbackism is dissipated by the resistless force of 
educated public opinion and elightened conscience. 
The captains, the teachers, the leaders in every com- 
munity who produce these results are and must be the 
men who have received a liberal education, and are in- 
spired by public spirit. The stability and beneficence 
of our Government is due to the fact, that neither stand- 
ing armies, or State Churches, or illiberal laws, or hered- 
itary orders of nobility, repress and restrain, but the 
scholars of the land, engaged in its practical pursuits, 
upon the rostrum, from the pulpit, through the press, in 
the disscussions at the corners, controvert or hold in or 
direct dangerous principles or elements. 

The liberally educated young men in our Country 
should be politicians, but it is almost impossible for 
them to be office holders. Office, unless they .have first 
secured at least a moderate competence, endangers their 
independence, retards their success, and may spoil "their 
careers. Public life has been in"all free States the highest 
and noblest of ambitions. To guide the Republic, com- 
mand listening senates, and promote the national welfare 
fill the full measure of duty and fame. But the same 
causes which threaten solid learning have changed the 
representative opportunities. The energy of business, 



14 

its absorption of all classes, its demand for uninterrupted 
time and attention, and the increase of the cost of living 
have nowhere produced such marked effects as upon our 
statesmanship. The legitimate expenses of an election 
almost equal the salary of the representative, and the 
exacting duties of the place prevent his successful man- 
agement of either a professional or mercantile vocation. 
The rapidly increasing labor of properly administering 
the government of this vast and growing Republic adds 
daily to the difficulties of the situation. Men of affairs 
instead of applauding the public spirit of one of their 
number who enters the public service, regard him with 
distrust, and withdraw their confidence and credit. Hence 
the halls of Congress are gradually filling up with 
wealthy men and professional place men. The glorious 
school in which preceding generations were trained for 
grand careers, is almost disbanded. Convictions yield 
to expediency, and the ability to guide, and the courage 
to resist are leaving their accustomed seats. By combi- 
nations and cunning, mediocrity occupies positions it can- 
not fill, and the machine runs for the suppression of dan- 
gerous ability and the division of all the dividends of 
honor and power among its directors. The leaders 
are dependent upon followers who have no livelihood, 
but office, and who desert the setting, and worship 
the rising Sun, with a facility which surpasses the 
middle age courtier, who cried, the King is dead, 
long live the King. The necessity of manipulation 
for re-election, of re-election for a vocation gives no 
opportunity to master those great questions upon whose 



15 

wise solution depend the destiny of the commonwealth, 
and the representative devoured by a consuming 
anxiety about his fortunes, and having failed to 
study the needs and principles of government, is 
blown about by every shifting current of the popular 
breath. When he falls, because he has builded upon 
the sand, if he has passed the period when adaptation 
is possible to new pursuits, he closes his career as a 
doorkeeper, a claim agent or a department clerk. There 
is not at this hour in public life a single recognized, and 
undisputed leader of a great party, or the progenitor of 
accepted ideas. The Congressional Record is a morass 
of crudity and words, whose boundless area and fathom- 
less depths, none have the courage to explore. The 
Washingtons, Adamses, and Jays of the first period, the 
Hamiltons, Jeffersons, and Madisons of the second, the 
Websters, Clays, and Calhouns of the third, and the 
Sewards, Sumners, Chases, and Lincolns of the fourth, 
have no successors of equal power and influence. The 
debates of to-day are unread, but the utterances of these 
statesmen were the oracles of millions. Has the talent 
which made these men eminent died out? Oh, no. It 
is practicing law, editing newspapers, managing manu- 
factories, mines, and commerce, building railroads, and 
directing transportation. 

If then those who fill the leader's place cannot lead, 
so much greater the responsibility and duty which rests 
upon the liberally educated to so watch and ward, so 
understand and teach, so discuss, and act, that an intelli- 
gent and vigilant public opinion shall hold in its grasp 



16 

and direct for its purposes Presidents, Cabinets and Con- 
gresses. Never fear, but if they are true to their 
mission, whenever one of those mighty crises come 
which threaten the stability of our institutions and de- 
mand the services of the loftiest patriotism and genius, 
that from the ranks will spring other Websters and 
Clays to the Council, other Sewards, Chases and Stantons 
to the Cabinet, other Lincolns to the Presidency and 
other Grants, Shermans, Sheridans and Thomases to the 
field. 

The privilege of freely criticising is granted only to 
those who can greatly boast. We need have no regrets 
for the past, or anxiety for its return. No time is so 
good as the present, no period, no country so rich in 
liberty and opportunity as ours. Races have lived and 
died, nations have flourished and perished, heroes, mar- 
tyrs and sages have left priceless legacies and we are 
their heirs and the beneficiaries of all the experience, 
the examples and the accumulations of the past. The 
most radical, we are also the most conservative of States. 
We can canonize William Lloyd Garrison as a Reformer, 
and dismiss Dennis Kearney as a Demagogue. Extremes 
finding unexpected safety valves in a freedom of speech, 
which amounts to license, and seeking walls to tear 
down, beat against the empty air, while Conservatism, 
in our written Constitutions, our adoption of the com- 
mon law, our reverence for the Fathers, our Independent 
Judiciary, finds rights protected and wrongs redressed. 
Genius, which was misunderstood, or ignored, or perse- 
cuted, or put to death in its own times,* receives the 



17 

recognition and applause of ours. Plato was sold 
into slavery and Socrates compelled to drink the 
Hemlock. Cicero plead to bought juries, Sidney 
and Russell, though heroes with us, were Martyrs in 
their own age. Galileo was forced to deny his phil- 
osophy and Bacon's contemporaries said his works 
were like the " Peace of God, which passeth all under- 
standing." The wits and worthies of the time of 
Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne are more thoroughly 
appreciated and largely read by this generation, than 
by all which have preceded. While even the earlier 
part of this century doubted and opposed the railroad, 
tried to prevent the introduction of gas, and sneered at 
and fought the telegraph, this decade welcomes and 
encourages all invention and discovery, art and letters. 
Twenty years ago Enmferson, the transcendentalist, and 
Darwin, the evolutionist, were alike the objects of al- 
most universal sneers and scoffs, and now the World, 
assigning to each the highest place in his sphere, stands 
by reverently with bared head, while the one is buried 
beneath the Concord elms, and the other is laid away 
in Westminster Abbey, among England's mighty dead. 
A recent tragedy which shocked and stilled the 
world, brought before his countrymen a glorious exam- 
ple of the scholar in public life. While performing 
with rigid exactness all the duties of his calling, he 
never neglected the claims the community had upon his 
citizenship and culture. He found time every day for 
his allotted lines from the classics, and pages in some 
book of solid worth. When he enlisted in the Army, 



18 

he mastered the curriculum of West Point in three 
months, and won Kentucky by crossing a swollen river, 
when the engineers could suggest no remedy, upon a 
bridge constructed from recollections of Caesar's Com- ■ 
mentaries. He learned the French language to get 
readier access to the great works upon finance, when 
his Congressional duties demanded a solution of that 
vital question ; and reasoning from original principles, 
founded in his college life, impressed upon the Supreme 
Court of the United States a new bulwark of liberty. 
The broad foundation he laid at Williams, his loyalty 
ever after to learning, and the uses and duties of knowl- 
edge, developed the backwoods boy into the learned 
scholar, the good teacher, the successful soldier, the ac- 
complished lawyer, the eloquent orator, the equipped 
statesman^ and the lamented President James A. Gar- 
field. 



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